Harry’s Place

R.I.P.

What an outrage. What a happy result. I wonder if the Court had ever been asked to visit the issue before, which seems to me like a Consitutional no-brainer.

Hope this doesn’t sound banal but they had the right name for it.

RIP

Truly courageous and genuinely honourable.

I’m told that in Virginia today, it is illegal to rent a single-bedroomed home to two people of the same gender. And, as in most US states, it is illegal for a 20 year old to buy a beer. Still plenty for the rest of us to show solidarity with Americans about.

“I’m told that in Virginia today, it is illegal to rent a single-bedroomed home to two people of the same gender.”

It may be. I have never heard of something like that being enforced.
I used to feel strongly about the drinking age. I turned legal when I was 19, had it yanked away what I was twenty, and recovered it when I was 21. Now I am old and I don’t much care.

Gene

Sometimes I am blown away by the clear restatement of something i thought i knew.

Your post justblew away some fog.

you say she has died aged, the relatively young, 68 and that her supreme court challenge to state illegality of marrying the person she loved succeeded in 1967.

Good god I thought, at the age of 27 just 41 years ago it was illegal in her state to have a mixed race marriage!

I just kept telling myself this fact in different ways and suggest to those who are so ready to demand of Barrack Obama that he be a post-racial candidate, that they try it as an excercise.

So many commenters talk of the Black American experience as if it is a confection of ancient history and fantasised notions of slavery.

Another way of putting this is to realise that a Black American presidential candidate will have voters who in; their own lifetimes were not able to have a mixed race marriage.

It’s a great post. Its actually not so long ago that this bizarre notion of trying to ban interracial marriage was more commonplace.

But even the concept of “interracial” is absurd. Black and white people are not of separate races; they are one.

“Another way of putting this is to realise that a Black American presidential candidate will have voters who in; their own lifetimes were not able to have a mixed race marriage.”

Who is himself the product of a mixed marriage. Peformed and consumated in the United States. In the early 1960s. Was it technically illegal at the time and place?

I agree with Benjamin. There is no such thing as a race.

Who is himself the product of a mixed marriage. Peformed and consumated in the United States. In the early 1960s. Was it technically illegal at the time and place?

It took place in Hawaii, I assume, and was legal there.

Probably true, Gene. Hawaii is such a an ethnic hodge-podge it would have been barely remarkable.

It’s funny. I grew up in the Canal Zone, which had an uber-Southern culture. Segregation was just ending when I was a kid. And my parents caught hell because I played with the only black kids on the street when I was 4 or five. (I didn’t learn about the hell til later.) But it seemed that at least half my dad’s seaman coleagues had Asian wives. But Panama itself is an ethnic hodge-podge, with whites (Panamanian), Jamaicans, Chinese, Mestizos, indios, jews, germans, micks, etc etc. It must have been weird for the Americans types, most from the Jim Crow South, who first built and ran the place.

Prior to the fitting named “Loving vs. Virginia” decision by the US Supreme Court in 1967, the issue of interracial marriage was one for states to decide on their own. It would only affect those that resided in that state. Most states in the US in 1967 including Hawaii allowed interracial sex and marriage. 16 states, including Virginia did not. All these separate state laws became invalid by the Supreme Court’s decision in “Loving”.

Interesting coincidences, the Loving decision was announced on June 12, 1967, two days after the Six-Day War ended. The following day, June 13th, President Lyndon Johnson announced the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to be the first Black to be a Justice of the US Supreme Court. In September 67, Sec. of State Dean Rusk, who came from Georgia, supported his daughter’s marriage to her Black boyfriend. See “At Canaan’s Edge” by Taylor Branch (2006) p. 622 & p.642 for details.

The Loving decsion was terse and unanimous, and decided, as I suspected, under the 14th amendment.

“There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.”

The US Canal Zone people or Zonians were the American equivalent of the British Rhodesians, and treated the Panamians like dirt.

Hawaii was a truely intergrated society of Japanese, Chinese, White Americans, Portugeese, Fillipino and native Haiwaians. It was because it was such a racially and ethnically mixed society that it did not become a State until 1959.

Thanks Gene, for posting this story. It was not until today that I realized what a quite, private couple the Lovings were. And that they shunned all the plubicity their basic desire to live as a married couple in their native state brought to them.

I always visualise the american civil rights movement of around that period in monochrome for some reason, without thinking my brain categorises it as being from some distant epoch. JFK, the space race etc all get technicolor.

Jon d: I hope you get a chance to see a film called “Pleasantville”. Often billed as a light comedy, it contains some barbed stuff.
Mesquito: the Panama canal was largely built by migrant workers from the English-speaking caribbean.
Mesquito: my wife has a story of a childhood visit to relatives which involved a stirr as a result of playing with children down the street. She’s never forgotten why her mum thought Coventry in the middle of the second world war was a much better place than Belfast.

This would be in America? You mean in “the Land of the Free” you had to have a court decide who could marry whom?

Well, Larkers, Virginia was free to ban the marriage just as DC was to permit it.

Seriously, an inspiring story as well as one which shocks to find out how recently it was a legal matter. As Benji said, black and white are too vague, especially in the US where mixing has gone on ‘down-stairs’ for a long time. Mildred Loving was part Rappahanock, and there’s little way to tell how much of her ‘black’ parentage was also ‘white’.

And they had the appropriate names.

Macpherson: “As Benji said, black and white are too vague, especially in the US where mixing has gone on ‘downstairs’ for a long time.”
Yes, that is definitely true in the South, especially the rural areas, though not true in rest of the country where we supposed enlighten yankees have been pretty good at keeping blacks a good arms length (figuratively speaking) away from us.

Back in the 1960s, my parents were attending a party at a black friend’s home. A black lady, who perhaps had a little too much to drink, told my dad, “Down hume (home, the South) we knew who our white kin were!”

where we supposed enlighten yankees have been pretty good at keeping blacks a good arms length (figuratively speaking) away from us.

Surely six inches would have been enough?

Alec Macpherson: “Surely six inches would have been enough.”

Alec, in the North, we do not believe in taking chances where blacks are involved!